Patents and Proprietary Rights
Our success will depend, in part, on our ability to obtain and protect our proprietary rights in the United States and in other countries. To do so, we will continue to rely on patents, trademarks, trade secrets, and confidentiality and other agreements to protect our proprietary rights. We intend to seek patent protection whenever appropriate for any product candidates, including methods for their manufacture and use, and related technology we develop or acquire in the future.
We have been building and continue to expand our intellectual property portfolio relating to JATENZO. We strive to protect and enhance the proprietary technologies that we believe are important to our business and seek patent protection, where appropriate, in the United States and internationally for compositions related to JATENZO, its methods of use and any other inventions that are important to the development of our business. Our policy is to actively seek to protect our proprietary position by, among other things, filing patent applications in the United States and abroad, including Europe and other major countries when appropriate, relating to proprietary technologies that are important to the development of our business.
However, patent protection may not afford us with complete protection against competitors who seek to circumvent our patents. We cannot be sure that patents will be granted with respect to any of our pending patent applications or with respect to any patent applications filed by us in the future, nor can we be sure that any of our existing patents or any patents that may be granted to us in the future will be commercially useful in protecting our technology. There is also the risk, however, that third parties have patents or may obtain patents having claims that also cover JATENZO. Lipocine asserted the use of JATENZO infringes its patents, and has attacked patents and applications in our portfolio by patent interferences, see “— Legal Proceedings” subsection below.
Our success will depend significantly on our ability to obtain and maintain patent and other proprietary protection for the technologies, inventions, know-how and products we consider important to our business, defend our patents, preserve the confidentiality of our trade secrets and operate our business without infringing the patents and proprietary rights of third parties.
Our U.S. patent portfolio on JATENZO currently includes five issued patents: U.S. Patent No. 8,241,664, which expires March 2029; U.S. Patent No. 8,492,369, which expires December 2030, as well as U.S. Patent Nos. 8,778,916, 10,543,219 and 10,617,696, each of which expires in April 2030. The issued U.S. patents contain claims to both pharmaceutical compositions and methods of treatment using our proprietary pharmaceutical composition and all are listed in the FDA Orange Book: Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations. In addition, we have several patent applications pending in the United States and other countries that, if issued, will cover pharmaceutical compositions, methods of treatment and other features of JATENZO, and have the potential to extend patent coverage beyond 2030.
We also have issued patents covering JATENZO in Australia, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Europe, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa and South Korea.
Our portfolio also contains pending applications around the world, including in the United States, Brazil, Canada and Europe. These patent applications, if they were to issue, have the potential to extend the patent coverage beyond 2030.
We solely own all the issued patents and the pending patent applications in our JATENZO patent portfolio. However, one of our applications having claims covering JATENZO was recently the subject of an interference proceeding. While we prevailed in this interference proceeding, there is risk that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office could declare other interference proceedings involving patent claims that cover JATENZO as discussed in more detail in “— Legal Proceedings” below.
TU, the active pharmaceutical ingredient in JATENZO, as well as its use for treating hypogonadism, are well known in this field. Accordingly, The TU active ingredient, standing alone, is not protected by any third
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